As someone who moved overseas to be with my partner in their home country, and who left behind my place of birth quite happily and with eyes fully open, continually able to visit, it's STILL painful at times. Of course it is??
Ilya would want to show Shane his mother's favourite spot in the park near their house, and his school, and the rink where he learned to skate. The stupid places they went on school field trips, and the grocery store that always gave him a pastry at the bakery counter. The one spot along the river where he used to skip stones and hunt frogs. He can't do that, not ever, and that's a LOSS.
There are a thousand small candies and snack foods and cereals and street foods that he will never eat again. Restaurants that will disappear before he can have that one dish again, the one that was his sole source of comfort some days. Holidays and festivals will come and go without the cookies Sveta's family used to buy for guests, without the smell of the mingling foods of the street carnival in the cold winter air, without the simple little communal things that everyone eats and smells and sees and knows. That lack, it sits inside you.
The places he knew best will grow and change and move on without him until he doesn't know them any more, until they are so different that it feels like he could never have been a part of them even though he was, he WAS, and there is undeniable grief in that.
Knowing that, except on very special and planned occasions with specific people, he will never again be in a place where he can speak without an accent, without having to explain himself, without THINKING so damn much about what he wants to say and how to say it so people understand. It doesn't matter how good his English gets, the language that lives in his bones and lines his brain and his heart isn't the language of the people around him, and he is always, ALWAYS Other because of it.
He'll never be able to go home, simple as that. He might hate it, but it birthed him, it grew him. That shit lingers.
Choosing to leave, choosing to say 'no more' to the brutal obligations of his family, choosing Shane, is a joy and a relief and a GIFT but it is also FUCKING HARD.
Ignoring or simplifying that does such a disservice to the immigrant experience, to the LGBTQIA+ experience, to any of us who have chosen to fling ourselves across the world for love or escape or opportunity or any other reason. It can be the right choice and also be incredibly painful.
Let Ilya be sad. Let Ilya be homesick. Let Ilya talk into dark as the flames flicker and as the loons call across the lake about how the sunlight falls on a Moscow afternoon. Let him laugh through tears as he thinks about the beautiful times he had in his home before he found this one.
dailybridgerton
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